Are humans getting dumber?George DvorskyA new study published in Trends in Genetics is suggesting that humans are slowly but surely losing their intellectual and emotional capacities. According to Stanford University's Gerald Crabtree, humanity peaked in intelligence about 2,000 years ago, and we've been heading downhill since then, owing to genetic mutations that aren't being selected against. It's possible that Crabtree is right " but his argument may be a moot point.First, let's take a closer look at the study.

In the year 5012...As Crabtree notes, human intelligence is the result of thousands of different genes that arose during the course of our evolution. And indeed, human intelligence " from a genetic perspective " reached its current configuration some time during the Paleolithic era of our ancestry (about 6,000 years ago).

This level of intelligence was very likely a requirement for survival; those who were less intellectually endowed were unlikely to pass on their genes. As Crabtree noted in his paper, "A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny."

But now, says Crabtree, life is easy and we no longer have to be smart to survive and produce offspring. As a result, we are no longer reinforcing the genetic integrity of our intelligence through extreme selectional processes. And it's because of this that our brains are withering away like our appendixes. Given enough time, Crabtree suspects that we will become increasingly susceptible to mutations that will lead to intellectual disabilities...................http://io9.com...

I don't think we are getting dumber has a whole, but I do see us creating a wider gap in intelligence. Take the GMAT for example. That effectively filters out a big chunk of people with lower intelligence capability. (not that everyone who does well on it has high IQ's in the various methods to measure it). Once people get filtered into the various socioeconomic categories, odds are they will mate with someone from the same category.

In other terms the smart may be getting smarter and the dumb may be getting dumber from the mechanisms that split us into various socioeconomic groups.

I do think over time we will be able to supplement intellectualism via computers and direct interface with the brain and close the gap. Could happen before we have to deal with the ethics of having two populations with different brain capabilities. The way we argue rich versus poor these days, could you imagine us discussing dumb versus smart? Sorry to be so crass.

At 11/14/2012 8:59:39 AM, slo1 wrote:Are humans getting dumber?George DvorskyA new study published in Trends in Genetics is suggesting that humans are slowly but surely losing their intellectual and emotional capacities. According to Stanford University's Gerald Crabtree, humanity peaked in intelligence about 2,000 years ago, and we've been heading downhill since then, owing to genetic mutations that aren't being selected against. It's possible that Crabtree is right " but his argument may be a moot point.First, let's take a closer look at the study.

In the year 5012...As Crabtree notes, human intelligence is the result of thousands of different genes that arose during the course of our evolution. And indeed, human intelligence " from a genetic perspective " reached its current configuration some time during the Paleolithic era of our ancestry (about 6,000 years ago).

This level of intelligence was very likely a requirement for survival; those who were less intellectually endowed were unlikely to pass on their genes. As Crabtree noted in his paper, "A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny."

But now, says Crabtree, life is easy and we no longer have to be smart to survive and produce offspring. As a result, we are no longer reinforcing the genetic integrity of our intelligence through extreme selectional processes. And it's because of this that our brains are withering away like our appendixes. Given enough time, Crabtree suspects that we will become increasingly susceptible to mutations that will lead to intellectual disabilities...................http://io9.com...

This is not indicative of the fact that technology has increased ten fold and will continue to do so until the end of time.............

At 11/14/2012 9:32:21 AM, royalpaladin wrote:I am going to have to do more research, but this argument was advanced by Nietzsche a while ago. This is not new.

I believe you are right. It surely isn't new. It is a very interesting concept that humanity has very different survival strategies than a few thousand years ago and it might impact future generations in negative ways.

I think there are too many variables that can happen along the way to predict something like this though. A possibility....sure. How possible....maybe not so much.

At 11/14/2012 8:59:39 AM, slo1 wrote:Are humans getting dumber?George DvorskyA new study published in Trends in Genetics is suggesting that humans are slowly but surely losing their intellectual and emotional capacities. According to Stanford University's Gerald Crabtree, humanity peaked in intelligence about 2,000 years ago, and we've been heading downhill since then, owing to genetic mutations that aren't being selected against. It's possible that Crabtree is right " but his argument may be a moot point.First, let's take a closer look at the study.

In the year 5012...As Crabtree notes, human intelligence is the result of thousands of different genes that arose during the course of our evolution. And indeed, human intelligence " from a genetic perspective " reached its current configuration some time during the Paleolithic era of our ancestry (about 6,000 years ago).

This level of intelligence was very likely a requirement for survival; those who were less intellectually endowed were unlikely to pass on their genes. As Crabtree noted in his paper, "A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny."

But now, says Crabtree, life is easy and we no longer have to be smart to survive and produce offspring. As a result, we are no longer reinforcing the genetic integrity of our intelligence through extreme selectional processes. And it's because of this that our brains are withering away like our appendixes. Given enough time, Crabtree suspects that we will become increasingly susceptible to mutations that will lead to intellectual disabilities...................http://io9.com...

I don't think we're growing dumber, per se. I would say we've sort of plateaued for a while, and some of the "rich vs poor" conflict has spilled over into the social institution of education. Take a look at the welfare collecting population. While stereotypes about them abound, they aren't necessarily true for many. They have to survive, have the will to survive, obviously, or they wouldn't still be collecting welfare and still creating generations in their poverty. No matter how many hoops are concocted for them to jump through, they manage to learn how to jump through them to ensure their survival. Some even rise above this hoop jumping into what has become our normative hoop jumping, so their survival intelligence is obviously above those of the others, and still a few more even become the cliched "rags to riches" stories, so even that can be used to refute some of the assertions in the article.

Obviously those who go rags to riches have a higher survival intelligence than some of us do. Ascending the ladder higher than we have is no small feat. So did some of that "bred out" intelligence make some coincidental evolutionary leap, or what? Or is there some particular unmapped code in our DNA that chooses to surface and manifest as intelligence, completely at random?

I don't think it's solely a matter of genetically determined intelligence that makes people the way they are. I believe it's more environmentally related, e.g. the social institution I averred to above. We don't seem to educate people into being totally well rounded as we did before. There's more specialization into a sort of humanesque "anthood," in my humble opinion. We educate people into our worker ants, soldier ants, drone ants, and so on down the line. I will grant and concede, however, that the upper limits of intelligence may have a purely genetically based capstone.

Sorry to dumb this discussion down to a simple "nature vs nurture" debate, but there it is.

On an exploratory tangent, what's this idea I'm seeing about having bred one similar intelligence with another, and therefore creating an intelligence gap of sorts as a society or species? Again, using the welfare example, I have to disagree when people do rise above without having had such genetic stock bred in their general direction in who knows how long, unless someone like Hawking or Chomsky happened to be slumming one horny day, LOL.

I will grant the theories in one way, however. If we dropped a mind like, say, N. DeGrasse Tyson's into the wilds with a mind like, oh, Snooki's, and gave them no survival tools whatsoever, I doubt seriously the slack jawed munchkin's chances of coming back to civilization at all, let alone in one piece. Unless her drooling zombie fans got wind of her plight and went rushing willy nilly out there to find her. Even then, I would hope none of them come back, LMAO.

We are becoming stupid in two ways. The first is the genetic "Idiocracy" argument... This happens so slowly that we will likely wipe ourselves out before it gets anywhere, so I'm not that concerned.

What I am concerned about are the immediate effects of technology making us stupider. Some people these days can't even remember their own 7-digit phone number (I used to work cust serv and you'd be appalled at how many people can't answer the question "what's your number"), never-mind all their friends' numbers. When I was younger, before cell-phones, we had everyone's phone numbers memorized. And it was NOT hard to do.

I used to get yelled at by all of at&t's and Verizon's customers on a daily basis at that job, because our customers would accuse me of putting their dear-old grannies in trouble with our shotty service and malfunctioning handsets. I wish I could have said "ma'am/sir, cell-phones have only been out for about 15 years... what were our grandparents doing before then? Just dying alone without anyone to help them?" The reason why these people were mad at me is because they are now dependent on this technology. No longer do we need to keep close tabs on those who need us, we can just give them a cell-phone and go on with our lives without them. It's pretty sickening, the more you think about it. Of course most of you are so young that you really have no idea what I'm talking about do you...

Beliefs in a nutshell:
- The Ends never justify the Means.
- Objectivity is secondary to subjectivity.
- The War on Drugs is the worst policy in the U.S.
- Most people worship technology as a religion.
- Computers will never become sentient.

At 11/15/2012 9:42:38 AM, R0b1Billion wrote:We are becoming stupid in two ways. The first is the genetic "Idiocracy" argument... This happens so slowly that we will likely wipe ourselves out before it gets anywhere, so I'm not that concerned.

What I am concerned about are the immediate effects of technology making us stupider. Some people these days can't even remember their own 7-digit phone number (I used to work cust serv and you'd be appalled at how many people can't answer the question "what's your number"), never-mind all their friends' numbers. When I was younger, before cell-phones, we had everyone's phone numbers memorized. And it was NOT hard to do.

I used to get yelled at by all of at&t's and Verizon's customers on a daily basis at that job, because our customers would accuse me of putting their dear-old grannies in trouble with our shotty service and malfunctioning handsets. I wish I could have said "ma'am/sir, cell-phones have only been out for about 15 years... what were our grandparents doing before then? Just dying alone without anyone to help them?" The reason why these people were mad at me is because they are now dependent on this technology. No longer do we need to keep close tabs on those who need us, we can just give them a cell-phone and go on with our lives without them. It's pretty sickening, the more you think about it. Of course most of you are so young that you really have no idea what I'm talking about do you...

LMAO I'm old enough to remember. Hilarious! Not your misfortunes, but I can remember the days when a "clamshell" was the optimum "non-brain melting via microwaves" option in cell phones. Motorola, FTW, and my carrier was Verizon's parent company, BAM (Bell Atlantic Mobile). *228 fixed every programming glitch there is. ;)

At 11/15/2012 9:42:38 AM, R0b1Billion wrote:We are becoming stupid in two ways. The first is the genetic "Idiocracy" argument... This happens so slowly that we will likely wipe ourselves out before it gets anywhere, so I'm not that concerned.

What I am concerned about are the immediate effects of technology making us stupider. Some people these days can't even remember their own 7-digit phone number (I used to work cust serv and you'd be appalled at how many people can't answer the question "what's your number"), never-mind all their friends' numbers. When I was younger, before cell-phones, we had everyone's phone numbers memorized. And it was NOT hard to do.

I used to get yelled at by all of at&t's and Verizon's customers on a daily basis at that job, because our customers would accuse me of putting their dear-old grannies in trouble with our shotty service and malfunctioning handsets. I wish I could have said "ma'am/sir, cell-phones have only been out for about 15 years... what were our grandparents doing before then? Just dying alone without anyone to help them?" The reason why these people were mad at me is because they are now dependent on this technology. No longer do we need to keep close tabs on those who need us, we can just give them a cell-phone and go on with our lives without them. It's pretty sickening, the more you think about it. Of course most of you are so young that you really have no idea what I'm talking about do you...

LMAO I'm old enough to remember. Hilarious! Not your misfortunes, but I can remember the days when a "clamshell" was the optimum "non-brain melting via microwaves" option in cell phones. Motorola, FTW, and my carrier was Verizon's parent company, BAM (Bell Atlantic Mobile). *228 fixed every programming glitch there is. ;)

They still use *228 on Verizon.

Beliefs in a nutshell:
- The Ends never justify the Means.
- Objectivity is secondary to subjectivity.
- The War on Drugs is the worst policy in the U.S.
- Most people worship technology as a religion.
- Computers will never become sentient.

At 11/15/2012 9:42:38 AM, R0b1Billion wrote:We are becoming stupid in two ways. The first is the genetic "Idiocracy" argument... This happens so slowly that we will likely wipe ourselves out before it gets anywhere, so I'm not that concerned.

What I am concerned about are the immediate effects of technology making us stupider. Some people these days can't even remember their own 7-digit phone number (I used to work cust serv and you'd be appalled at how many people can't answer the question "what's your number"), never-mind all their friends' numbers. When I was younger, before cell-phones, we had everyone's phone numbers memorized. And it was NOT hard to do.

I used to get yelled at by all of at&t's and Verizon's customers on a daily basis at that job, because our customers would accuse me of putting their dear-old grannies in trouble with our shotty service and malfunctioning handsets. I wish I could have said "ma'am/sir, cell-phones have only been out for about 15 years... what were our grandparents doing before then? Just dying alone without anyone to help them?" The reason why these people were mad at me is because they are now dependent on this technology. No longer do we need to keep close tabs on those who need us, we can just give them a cell-phone and go on with our lives without them. It's pretty sickening, the more you think about it. Of course most of you are so young that you really have no idea what I'm talking about do you...

LMAO I'm old enough to remember. Hilarious! Not your misfortunes, but I can remember the days when a "clamshell" was the optimum "non-brain melting via microwaves" option in cell phones. Motorola, FTW, and my carrier was Verizon's parent company, BAM (Bell Atlantic Mobile). *228 fixed every programming glitch there is. ;)

They still use *228 on Verizon.

LOL I know, I still have Verizon. Been a loyal customer since the Bell Atlantic days, though that doesn't make me old, necessarily. That was my personal phone, though, my work phone was Nextel, of course.

I remember when I was debating/discussing with a teacher I had some 3 years ago about if the theory of evolution is true or wrong (this was at a time when I believed that the theory of evolution was completely wrong). I can remember that he once said that we humans just get smarter and smarter as the years goes by. I guess he was wrong. Either that, or this study is just flawed and wrong.

At 11/14/2012 8:59:39 AM, slo1 wrote:Are humans getting dumber?George DvorskyA new study published in Trends in Genetics is suggesting that humans are slowly but surely losing their intellectual and emotional capacities. According to Stanford University's Gerald Crabtree, humanity peaked in intelligence about 2,000 years ago, and we've been heading downhill since then, owing to genetic mutations that aren't being selected against. It's possible that Crabtree is right " but his argument may be a moot point.First, let's take a closer look at the study.

In the year 5012...As Crabtree notes, human intelligence is the result of thousands of different genes that arose during the course of our evolution. And indeed, human intelligence " from a genetic perspective " reached its current configuration some time during the Paleolithic era of our ancestry (about 6,000 years ago).

This level of intelligence was very likely a requirement for survival; those who were less intellectually endowed were unlikely to pass on their genes. As Crabtree noted in his paper, "A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny."

But now, says Crabtree, life is easy and we no longer have to be smart to survive and produce offspring. As a result, we are no longer reinforcing the genetic integrity of our intelligence through extreme selectional processes. And it's because of this that our brains are withering away like our appendixes. Given enough time, Crabtree suspects that we will become increasingly susceptible to mutations that will lead to intellectual disabilities...................http://io9.com...

This is not indicative of the fact that technology has increased ten fold and will continue to do so until the end of time.............

Technology is indicative to only those who pursue the development of technology. It does nothing for the advancement of intellegence of people as a whole.

It's not your views that divide us, it's what you think my views should be that divides us.

If you think I will give up my rights and forsake social etiquette to make you "FEEL" better you are sadly mistaken

If liberal democrats would just stop shooting people gun violence would drop by 90%

At 11/18/2012 9:09:05 AM, Clash wrote:I remember when I was debating/discussing with a teacher I had some 3 years ago about if the theory of evolution is true or wrong (this was at a time when I believed that the theory of evolution was completely wrong). I can remember that he once said that we humans just get smarter and smarter as the years goes by. I guess he was wrong. Either that, or this study is just flawed and wrong.

He was espousing the Flynn effect, a theory that asserts humans will get more intelligent as population grows. Although a lot of data supports the position (http://www.indiana.edu...), we just saw some dissenting opinion.

At 11/18/2012 9:09:05 AM, Clash wrote:I remember when I was debating/discussing with a teacher I had some 3 years ago about if the theory of evolution is true or wrong (this was at a time when I believed that the theory of evolution was completely wrong). I can remember that he once said that we humans just get smarter and smarter as the years goes by. I guess he was wrong. Either that, or this study is just flawed and wrong.

He was espousing the Flynn effect, a theory that asserts humans will get more intelligent as population grows. Although a lot of data supports the position (http://www.indiana.edu...), we just saw some dissenting opinion.

Btw, no explanations exist for the Flynn effect as they are all hotly debated. So it's factual basis is still debatable (as this study indicates).

I would actually like to see his evidence for this. He never presented any; he only claimed we were getting dumber. Smaller brain size =/= dumber; smaller brains are more compact and efficient and are generally compensated for by having more folds and thus a larger surface area.

There's no valid reason to think humans are going to survive long enough to see our genes devolve. A couple of centuries after nuclear proliferation TOPS.

Beliefs in a nutshell:
- The Ends never justify the Means.
- Objectivity is secondary to subjectivity.
- The War on Drugs is the worst policy in the U.S.
- Most people worship technology as a religion.
- Computers will never become sentient.

At 11/14/2012 8:59:39 AM, slo1 wrote:Are humans getting dumber?George DvorskyA new study published in Trends in Genetics is suggesting that humans are slowly but surely losing their intellectual and emotional capacities. According to Stanford University's Gerald Crabtree, humanity peaked in intelligence about 2,000 years ago, and we've been heading downhill since then, owing to genetic mutations that aren't being selected against. It's possible that Crabtree is right " but his argument may be a moot point.First, let's take a closer look at the study.

In the year 5012...As Crabtree notes, human intelligence is the result of thousands of different genes that arose during the course of our evolution. And indeed, human intelligence " from a genetic perspective " reached its current configuration some time during the Paleolithic era of our ancestry (about 6,000 years ago).

This level of intelligence was very likely a requirement for survival; those who were less intellectually endowed were unlikely to pass on their genes. As Crabtree noted in his paper, "A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny."

But now, says Crabtree, life is easy and we no longer have to be smart to survive and produce offspring. As a result, we are no longer reinforcing the genetic integrity of our intelligence through extreme selectional processes. And it's because of this that our brains are withering away like our appendixes. Given enough time, Crabtree suspects that we will become increasingly susceptible to mutations that will lead to intellectual disabilities...................http://io9.com...

I don't believe we're losing intelligence. I believe that certain areas of the brain are being preferred, namely, the frontal lobe. Unlike our pretechnological ancestors, whose survival was more dependent on brute strength, we as a species have come to use our minds, in place of the mechanics of physiology. You don't have to go very far, to realize this. Outdated and antiquated machinery is known for being very simple, with little to no technical training to operate it. For instance, the automobile was fairly easy to work on, with no more than a shade-tree mechanic needed to fix it. Now, most mechanics have gone through technical schools and, only, then, are certified to work on certain makes and models.